As a lead, if someone told me tomorrow that we don’t have to use Jira or Confluence anymore I’d thank them, and ask my boss to have the rest of the day off so that I can cry tears of joy and get drunk off whatever champagne makes the nicest bottle pop noise.

The only good thing I can say about them is that it really builds team spirit to chitchat while waiting for a page to load. One time, I was in a call with some people I don’t often speak with. While I was waiting to update the status of a task, I asked them if they knew that a guy from another department announced he and his husband were adopting a baby, and turns out no! We spent a good portion of the meeting waiting for Jira to load, but we took the opportunity to discuss gifts for the guy and it was quite productive planning. Thanks Atlassian!

I especially despise how bad the project/issuetype/workflow system is, whoever designed this could not manage a lemonade stand if their life depended on it. Let’s take a case study: some engineer discovers a critical bug in a testing API that completely blocks our test automation. According to our internal processes, I tell them to raise a blocker bug in Jira and assign it to me. In the next hours/days I get a bunch of calls and messages on Teams from multiple defect managers who either think we discovered a critical issue in our production software, or think that this should not be a bug at all because the customer will never use testing API’s. To fix the bug, I take a look at it and figure out a specific team needs to fix it. Said team has a specific issue type/workflow of course, so I get to work updating a bunch of fields that are not relevant, and since Jira is so unbelievably slow this supposed easy process takes me approximately 50 years. Thankfully the issue is easily fixed, turns out there was a problem in the backend and we deployed a fix for, yay! Except, not really. Even though the problem is fixed and all our automation engineers are happy, I still have to fill in a bunch of irrelevant fields in Jira in order to close the issue (this takes another 50 years because I cannot stress how slow Jira is). For example, “fix planned for X release of our software”. How is this relevant for a backend fix that is solved by our daily deployment to nonprod? Nobody knows, but defect management is asking me again about why I haven’t planned a release version for this fix. Idk bro wish I could but the backend has its own release versioning that is not in Jira.

“Well you can have teams define their issuetypes/workflows/custom fields!” yeah you could. But you need to control it before 100 different teams have their own issuetypes and so on. This is the job of our process quality guys, in theory. Every time I’m in a meeting with them, I swear there’s less life in their eyes compared to last week.